Take Swing States Out of the Equation in Presidential Race

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, October 8, 2000

IN A NATION with 100 million likely voters, the result of this year's presidential race may be decided by fewer than a million.

Those are the undecided voters in swing states with lots of votes in the Electoral College. Elementary math explains why both Al Gore and George W. Bush are paying much less attention to most of the South, New England and the Mountain West, as well as California, New York and Texas. These places are reliably Republican or Democratic, and there is not much point in contesting them.

So big swing states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri and Florida have been the object of the candidates' messages, carefully tailored to local voters.

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In some ways, Gore has proved more adept than Bush at aiming micro-messages at swing voters in swing states. The vice president's call for opening the strategic petroleum reserve and his attacks on Big Oil appeal to Midwestern voters worried about high heating bills this winter. His support for expanding Medicare to cover prescription drugs is intended to appeal to elderly voters in Florida, the one big Southern state in play.

Earlier, Gore went after another important electoral bloc in Florida, Cuban-Americans, by disagreeing with the Clinton administration in the Elian Gonzalez case. Though usually outspoken on the environment, Gore has been careful not to stress this theme too heavily when he is in the Rust Belt, where it is not popular with manufacturing workers. He has just as carefully avoided making an issue of gun control, which is unpopular with many Reagan Democrats in the Midwest.

While Bush is spending most of his time in swing states, too, he has not, like Gore, cobbled together an ad-hoc platform that makes specific promises to specific swing voters. The one exception may be Latinos, whom Bush frequently addresses in Spanish. A number of big swing states have large Latino populations.

In obsessively courting undecided voters in a few places, the candidates are doing more than neglecting the interests and values of Americans who do not pay high heating bills. They are neglecting issues of concern to the nation as a whole.

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The federal government spends far more on old people than on children, for example, but neither candidate will point that out, for fear of offending elderly swing voters. What should have been a great debate about the long-term reform of Social Security has lately been replaced by the wedge-issue politics of prescription-drug policy.

In a close election, time spent on issues of concern to every American is time lost in addressing the particular interests of the minuscule number of Americans who will choose the next occupant of the White House. This is a bad way to elect the president, who should have support from a wide variety of regions, religions and ethnic groups.

Can anything be done, short of replacing the Electoral College with direct election of the president -- a virtually impossible reform that would require a constitutional amendment?

Fortunately, it is possible to transform our presidential elections while keeping the Electoral College and without amending the Constitution. All we have to do is change the way that the states allocate their electoral votes.

Today, all but two states -- Nebraska, which has five electoral votes, and Maine, which has four -- give all of their electoral votes to the winner of the state's popular vote. If every state were to divide its electoral votes among the candidates on the breakdown of the popular vote, presidential politics would be reinvigorated.

For example, even if a majority of Californians and New Yorkers preferred the Democratic candidate, the division of their electoral votes would give a Republican candidate an incentive to make lots of visits to these states and to listen to voters' concerns there.

For the same reason, a Democratic presidential candidate, instead of writing off Texas and even vilifying it, as Vice President Gore has done, would court the states' substantial minority of Democrats and independents. A candidate who stressed a few themes of national importance might rack up more electoral votes nationwide than a rival who focused on a few important states.

Every state legislature has the power to switch from the winner- take-all system to a division of its electoral votes. Nebraska and Maine each give two electoral votes to the winner of the statewide popular vote, while allocating the remainder according to the winner of the popular vote within each congressional district.

Another method would be to assign electoral votes according to the proportions of the popular vote won by each candidate.

Critics of such reforms point out that they would increase the possi bility that no candidate would receive a majority of the electoral vote, especially in a three-way race in which no candidate received a majority of the popular vote. In that event, the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives, with each state delegation assigned a single vote. And yes, our Constitution really is that weird.

To avoid this crisis, states could adopt a different way of allocating electoral votes. On Election Day, voters would be asked to rank candidates in order of preference, marking their first, second and third choices. Then, when votes were counted, if the first choice didn't emerge in the top two, a second or third choice would get the vote.

This so-called instant-runoff system would make it extremely unlikely that any electoral votes would go to third-party candidates. Most third-party candidates, like John Anderson in 1980 and Ralph Nader today, have geographically broad but thin support. And candidates with regionally concentrated support, like George Wallace in 1968, have a greater chance of creating a constitutional crisis by piling up electoral votes under the present winner-take-all system than they would have under an instant-runoff system.

If states switched from the current system, then presidential candidates would begin hunting for electoral votes all over the country and paying attention to a greater variety of groups and interests.

The state legislatures should get to work now, so that in 2004 or 2008 we can have a chance to elect a president of the United States, rather than a president of the swing states.

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